Lemberg's (1995) thesis goes into digitization costs for all US library holdings in some detail and suggests that over the next 100 years there is a savings of roughly $44 billion to be archived by digitizing some 22 million documents (and discarding more than 400 million duplicate paper copies of them)...Also, he assumes that libraries would make no copyright payments for electronic documents, just as they do not now pay extra to loan a paper document.

This text in within a chapter that has compared the cost of digital collections to book (paper) collections held in a library. He gives cost estimates for digital book collections, campus library collections and off-site storage. There is a point when digital collections are more cost effective. He acknowledges that the costs become more attractive when many libraries can share in the costs of digitizing materials. As we can see above, those shared collections can have a positive impact on operating budgets if the paper copies are discarded and if the users are comfortable using the digital surrogates. Those are big if's.

Of course, this text jumped off the page for me because of the Google Book Settlement. Under the proposed terms of the settlement, public libraries will be able to access the digitized books. While this is a benefit because it will expand every library's collection, what if those libraries also eliminated books from their shelves that were now available digitally? It would be a tremendous act of faith for some libraries and it could be a money saver.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Every digitization program and digital libraries wants followers. As Seth Godin would say, they want a tribe. In his book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Godin explains that:

A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.

In the book, Godin talks about leadership and the creation of tribes. Tribes do not happen accidentally and they do not sustain themselves automatically. Communication is important among tribe members. Without communication, a tribe is just a crowd.

When we mount new services, we often are charged with creating a following for that service. Often we don't know how to do that. We do advertisements and some promotions, and then are thankfully for whatever user-base we achieve. This book will make you think about building a following -- a tribe -- differently.

Godin includes some principles in his book for leading a tribe. One of his principles will make people stop and think. It is "Exclude outsiders." In other words, knowing who isn't a part of your movement (your tribe) is as important as knowing who is. If you are trying to lead a group, who do you want to be part of that group? And who is the group not for? That clarity can be very important, because you cannot be all thing for all people.

It is very cool that Seth Godin practices what he preaches. Before Tribes was released, he began to gather a tribe. Once the book was published, he did something incredible. Everyone in his tribe had already ordered a copy of the book, but Godin sent them a second copy and ask that they share it with a friend. His tribe instantly doubled.

Let's look at this again. Godin created a message. Found people who were interested in the message and got them to join his tribe. Then he got them to influence others to read the message. And yes, he did this all online without any ads.

This is a very readable book (151 pages). I enjoyed reading it and being inspired by it, and I know others have found it inspiring as well. Is it a hardcore marketing book? No, and if it was, you wouldn't read it. Instead this is a book that you'll read and then pass along to your colleagues.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

SharedBook Inc. is using its custom publishing platform to host an ongoing discussion on the Google Book Settlement. Using their platform, people can read and review the settlement document, and then add their own comments or annotations. Besides the entire text of the settlement, the site has the complete text of the amicus brief filed by ALA, ACRL and ARL (collectively known as Library Associations).

Monday, June 22, 2009

If you are interested in the Google Book Search Settlement, then you may be interested in this two items.

First, the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) did a webinar on April 14, 2009 entitled "The Authors Guild, AAP, Google Settlement: What Authors & Publishers Need to Know as May 5th Approaches". This one-hour webinar is available for anyone to listen to (playback) for free.

By the way, since then, the opt-out deadline for authors and the fairness hearing have been delayed to September 4, 2009 and October 7, 2009 respectively.

Second, the CCC in its blog, Beyond the Book, did a 30-minute audio interview with Michael Healy on "Authors Guild, AAP, Google Settlement". Healy is currently executive director of the non-profit Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and is expected to become the executive director of the Book Rights Registry (BRR). This June 18th interview, he discusses the positives of the settlement on libraries and authors, and the new environment that this settlement is creating.

Sad news -- I just realized yesterday that I had not removed the June 24th workshop from the calendar on the left side of this blog. PLAN in Panama City Beach, FL had to cancel due to low registration numbers. (I wonder if that's due to the weather -- hurricane season or summer -- or the economy?) The workshop may be scheduled for later in the year.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Michael Lesk, a professor at Rutgers University, has written a book that is widely used entitled Understanding Digital Libraries (Second Edition). Lesk has had a long career including stints at the National Science Foundation and Bell Labs. He is a computer scientist who has built retrieval systems. Lesk brings that perspective to the topic.

Understanding Digital Libraries is divided into two parts. The first part of the book addresses what (chapters 1 - 7) and the second half discusses how (chapters 8 - 14), or in other words, what digital libraries contain and how they operate. At 400+ pages including figures, tables, references and index, this is a book chocked full of information.

I'll be using this book during the fall when I teach Digital Libraries at Syracuse University (IST 676). I see this book as laying groundwork for an interesting conversation that will include the questions: "So what is a digital library?" and "So what?" Given what are named digital libraries on the Internet, I think the "what" will be a lively conversation. And then thinking about the benefits of these entities...what rewards are we reaping from these things?

By the way, Dr. Lesk spoke at Syracuse University this past April and the video is available online (1 hr. 40 min.) Lesk talks about book scanning and gives his opinion of some of the machines, etc., in use today. Likely worth watching more than once.

Sustainability means that the project (program) will live on after the grant is completed. The organization needs to think upfront about funding, staffing and processes to ensure that occurs. The person from the IMLS specifically noted that they look at the sophistication and complexity of the digital preservation plans. Preservation of the assets should include the "rule of three". That means that there are at least three backups kept in geographically diverse locations. With backups spread across the U.S., for example, a environmental disaster in one area would not eliminate all of the backups.

Dissemination means that information about the project from is planning stage through to completion are made available to others. This level of transparency ensure that we all learn from the projects that are occurring. This information -- which might take the form of documents, reports, or presentations -- need to be accessible for the long-term, just like the digital assets that are created.

National impact means that the organization understand what their content and program means to a broader audience. For example, how does the material inform what we know about our history? How does the material improve our knowledge-base? What audience, outside of those that are known, will be interested in this material and how will they learn that the material exists?

Finally, each speaker talked about how proposals are reviewed. Applicants need to be aware that proposals are critically reviewed by experts and the the reviewers recommend which projects should be funded. IMLS will review drafts as well as talk to applications about the requirements, etc., and they encourage potential applications to contact them for assistance. I believe that the other two organizations can also provide additional information, if not some assistance. Applications should look not only at the grant requirements (and please read them before you start asking questions), but should also look at any information available on past award winners, since much can be learned about requirements by seeing what others have done.

I appreciated this session and hope that others blogged it, I'm sure we all took away different notes. If yes, I'll link to those blog posts when I find them.

So why should you care about this book? The library stereotype can be seen all over the place, but likely you don't realize it: ads, movies, toys, books, comics and more. And while we might want to ignore the stereotype, those around us aren't. In fact, they're using it because there is a coolness to it.

The book also contains information on people and organizations that are breaking the stereotype. (Full disclosure, I'm on pp. 93-94.) If you are new to the profession and wondering whose not looking like a librarian, this section will help!

It's important to note that the book is built on solid research. Kneale doesn't take this subject lightly. You'll be impressed with the appendices, notes, and references.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

A couple of things recently have brought to mind the phrase "smoke and mirrors" or in other words, things are not what they seem.

One person asked me about the digitization industry and how businesses are doing. Businesses always put on a good front, but what's really going on? What do the special deals and price cuts mean? Does the business seem too anxious to get your contract (work)? It can be hard for a business to be transparent...they aren't going to show you their financial records...so you can wonder if what you're seeing is truly good or "smoke and mirrors".

On the other side, organizations put out requests for proposal that seem to leave questions unanswered. The clues about their reality are in there, but will you recognize them? Could they be more transparent? Would they receive better proposals if they were?

And then there are programs that use a bit of "smoke and mirrors" in order to obscure they scope of what they have done. They feel that admitting that the scope of the project was bounded by X, Y and Z may make people think less of it. Yet if they were more transparent, people would understand the project more.

Smoke isn't permanent and so the truth will be revealed eventually. Mirrors can distort the truth, but they can also reflect the truth so clearly that it cannot be ignored. Wouldn't it be nice if we all just decided to be more transparent and truthful?

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

With the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference in Washington, DC, just days away, the question is -- Will I see you there? I'm involved in five events (below) . There are many sessions I hope to attend, so if you don't catch me at one of my sessions, you might see me running through the halls heading towards something interesting! SLA is famous for its open houses, so maybe we'll cross paths there, too.

The sessions I'm involved in are:

June 14, 10 Things in One Day: Applying social tools to your library (workshop with Sophia Guevara)

June 15, Copyright, Social Media and the Corporate Library (panel discussion)

On June 24, I'm scheduled to do a digitization workshop (Digitization 101: Planning & Management of Digitization Projects) in Florida for the Panhandle Library Access Network, Inc. Registration closes on June 10. The low-registration bug has bitten and this workshop has been canceled. (Could be the economy or just the summer weather.) PLAN may reschedule later in the year.

In the world of the Internet, the rapid growth and exponential use of digital medias leads to the emergence of virtual environments namely digital ecosystems composed of multiple and independent entities such as individuals, organizations, services, software and applications sharing one or several missions and focusing on the interactions and inter-relationships among them. The digital ecosystem exhibits self-organizing environments, thanks to the re-combination and evolution of its digital components, in which resources provided by each entity are properly conserved, managed and used. The underlying resources mainly comprehend data management, innovative services, computational intelligence and self-organizing platforms. Due to the multi-disciplinary nature of digital ecosystems and their characteristics, they are highly complex to study and design. This also leads to a poor understanding as to how managing resources will empower digital ecosystems to be innovative and value-creating. The application of Information Technologies has the potential to enable the understanding of how entities request resources and ultimately interact to create benefits and added-values, impacting business practices and knowledge.

These technologies can be improved through novel techniques, models and methodologies for fields such as data management, web technologies, networking, security, human-computer interactions, artificial intelligence, e-services and self-organizing systems to support the establishment of digital ecosystems and manage their resources.

The International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems (EDES) aims to develop and bring together a diverse community from academia, research laboratories and industry interested in exploring the manifold challenges and issues related to resource management of Digital Ecosystems and how current approaches and technologies can be evolved and adapted to this end. The conference seeks related original research papers, industrial papers and proposals for demonstrations, and tutorials and workshops.

Topics-------

We solicit original research and technical papers not published elsewhere. The papers can be theoretical, practical and application oriented on the following themes (but not limited to):

Preference will be given to submissions that take strong or challenging positions on important emergent topics related to Digital Ecosystems. At least one author should attend the conference to present the paper.

The conference Proceedings will be published by ACM and indexed by the ACM Digital Library.

Fourth International Conference on Digital Information Management (ICDIM 2009)University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USANovember 1-4, 2009http://www.icdim.orgTechnically co-sponsored by the Technology Management Council of IEEE.Proceedings will be published and indexed by IEEE Xplore

Call for Papers

Following the successful earlier conferences at Bangalore (2006) Lyon (2007), and London (2008) the fourth event is organized at Michigan (2009). The International Conference on Digital Information Management is a multidisciplinary conference on digital information management, science and technology. The principal aim of this conference is to bring people in academia, research laboratories and industry and offer a collaborative platform to address the emerging issues and solutions in digital information science and technology. The ICDIM intends to bridge the gap between different areas of digital information management, science and technology. This forum will address a large number of themes and issues. The conference will have original research and industrial papers on the theory, design and implementation of digital information systems, as well as demonstrations, tutorials, workshops and industrial presentation.

The topics in ICDIM 2009 include but are not confined to the following areas.

Sunday, June 07, 2009

On May 21, I spoke at the annual conference for the Society of Ohio Archivists. Thanks to the event organizers and especially Ron, Glenn and Eric for their help in getting me there and back, and ensuring that all went well for my presentation.

The event was held at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus, OH, which has nice space for events of this size. The event included sessions on digitization and other topics of interest to archivists. Participants came from across Ohio and even from as far away as Chicago!

I gave the plenary session entitled “What We Are Learning From Google & Flickr About Digitization and Partnership”. An excerpt of my slides is below. What I wanted to do was to get people to step back and think about what Google and Flickr are, and to think about how we are (or could) interact with them. Reactions to my presentation indicated that I truly did open people's eyes to the breadth of what Google is doing and introduce people to a side of Flickr that some were unaware of. In fact, even though it seems like Flickr is heavily used in the library and archives community, there were people in the audience who did not know about the service.

As I reflect on the questions that were asked and the conversations that occurred later in the day, these thoughts come to mind:

Collaboration is the way to go when thinking about digitization.

Hooking up with a for-profit organization has its benefits, but we need to keep in mind that they are focused on profit, while we're focused on service.

We all need to be aware of those for-profit organizations (e.g., Google and Flickr) that are working with non-for-profit organizations and what they are doing. This stuff does get reported in the news, on various web sites and in a number of blogs. We need to be seeing/skimming/reading the announcements.

We need to be mindful of all that Google is doing. We blind ourselves to the company's power when we think of them as only a search engine.

While Google in not the only search engine in the world, Flickr is also not the only photo-sharing service. Each service has its pros and cons.

Again thanks to the SOA for allowing me to speak to them on this topic. I'm glad that I was able to present compelling information and provide a different perspective. (An excerpt of my slides is below.) I also appreciated and learned from the sessions I was able to attend, and truly enjoyed touring the digitization facility at Ohio Historical Center.

Friday, June 05, 2009

There is a possibility that I'll be teaching a copyright course next spring. Although I know a lot about copyright, I know that I need to do more reading and have more information stuffed into my brain on the topic. While browsing in a used bookstore, I came across The Illustrated Story of Copyright by Edward Samuels. This book is out-of-print, but used copies are available and likely available through your library via interlibrary loan. (The hardbound copy originally sold for $40, which makes some of the used prices quite interesting.) If you are okay with an electronic copy, Samuels has actually placed the entire book online for free.

Published in 2000, this book is divided into two parts:

Copyright and Technology

Copyright Basics

Samuels, who is a law professor, who wrote the book so that you don't have to read the book cover-to-cover. In the introduction, he notes that some may want to read part one first, while others may want to start with part two, depending on the person's focus. He also included many cross-references within the book which "serve as 'hyperlinks' to the parts of the book that discuss other materials." (p. 7) His illustrations (photos) and ability to write so that it doesn't sound like a law book really attracted me. This is indeed a book that I'll be able to curl up with on the porch and enjoy learning from it.

If you're like me, then you have a few questions about the publication date. Yes, it includes information on Sono Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It does not include information on the TEACH Act which became law in 2002. Since this is not the only textbook I'll be using, that omission is not a problem for me.

So I have part of my summer reading in hand, but I know this isn't the only book I'll be devouring...

About Me

Jill Hurst-Wahl is an associate professor of practice in the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. She was the director its M.S. in Library and Information Science program (2012-2017). She is a member of the USNY Technology Policy and Practice Council (2009-president) and the OCPL Board of Trustees (2016-present). A former corporate librarian, Jill has always been an advocate for expanding the career opportunities for LIS graduates. Her interests include innovation, brainstorming, copyright, digitization, and social media.

Disclaimers

Google: This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services, to personalize ads and to analyze traffic. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies.

FTC Disclaimer: Digitization 101 is an Amazon affiliate and receives a small commission if you purchase a product or service from an Digitization 101 Amazon link.